This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Postmortem: Myst IV - Revelation

Big pre-production team. Myst IV: Revelation
was the first pre-rendered adventure game ever produced by the Montreal
Ubisoft studio and our lack of experience in pre-rendered games soon
hit us very hard. To accelerate pre-production and train our employees
for the production, we hired more than 50 new employees. The A.L.I.V.E.
engine was barely working, tools did not initially exist, the story was
not final, artistic direction was not well established, and no real
level design was ready when all these people joined up the project.
Extra pressure was put on game designers and programmers to feed the
modeling team and a lot of the artists started to feel frustrated about
not being busy enough, not receiving clear goals, and having embryonic
tools. A bad mood was established between the game designers,
programmers and modelers that only decreased slightly in the last few
months of the project when the swat teams where created and everybody
started to work together. Less than eight employees from the original
pre-production team finished the project. With this high turnover rate
we lost precious experience. We learned the hard way that in
pre-production you must have a very small dedicated team and you should
never start game production before the story, the design, artistic
direction and technologies are ready and fully tested. A creative
director and a production manager with strong power and vision at the
beginning of the project would have helped clarify the focus of the
game and the processes as well. - Nicolas Beaudette, Lead Programmer

Animations integration. Myst IV: Revelation
is a game where the main effort is put on creating a beautiful
landscape. We could only do final animation on final and approved sets.
The lighting was done at the end but was prepared in order to light the
sets but not the animations. This caused the animations to have to
adapt themselves to the sets and not the other way around like in
movies. - Gilles Monteil, Animation Director

Tracking changes.
No unified system or format was established to track and communicate
the changes to assets required between all members of the team. It
really became a nightmare to follow the completion of critical tasks
and to have an accurate up-to-date perspective of overall planning. A
lot of work was trashed because of the inefficiency in tracking
production assets. This was only resolved in the last ten months of
production, by the introduction of a database tracking the assets and
validations.- Nicolas Beaudette, Lead Programmer

Myst IV 's world come to life.

Lack of time to integrate the secondary animations.
Integration of the secondary animations (created just to give life to
the environments) was late and we had to close the game, so at the end
of production we had to cut some of what was previously planned.
However, it was impossible to cut into the story, or into the bulk of
the gameplay, (except for some stand-alone puzzles) and cutting sets
would have cause more trouble than just leaving them like they were. So
it was animation (and especially panels: animation rendering) that were
cut out, replaced most of the time by real-time effects in order not to
lose our goal, which was to have Myst IV: Revelation “come to life.” - Gilles Monteil, Animation Director

Defining a new production pipeline. Myst IV: Revelation's A.L.I.V.E. engine uses 360-degree bubble, mixing a lot of videos with alpha and real-time 3D effects. Myst III
was already using this kind of technology but we chose to expand the
concept much deeper. From the engine point of view, it was not so
difficult to integrate the technologies together but the tools and
production pipeline were a lot harder. We spent a lot of time finding
good tool combinations and procedures, whereas before the effect simply
looked slapped on top of things. - Nicolas Beaudette, Lead Programmer

Dual layer DVD. Myst IV: Revelation
was one of the first games to use the DVD9 format. It quickly appeared
that a lot of the DVD readers were not able to read the dual layers
copies despite assurance from manufacturing that we would experience no
problems. Worst of all, some problematic readers didn't have any
available firmware upgrades ... Customers were complaining about our
game not working on their systems but we could do nothing except
putting some pressure on DVD manufacturers to make the firmware
available. We also bought a wider array of DVD drives to upgrade our
chances of finding non-compatible drives in the future and improve
customer support.- Nicolas Beaudette, Lead Programmer

Conclusion

When
I arrived on the project, there was a year left of production, which
totaled three years all together. The first thing I did was to pass
through the concept as it was. As a Myst fan, I was very impressed about the fact that the team had succeeded in keeping all that makes a true Myst game, while improving all that could be improved.

However,
it was soon clear to me that we were not going to meet our deadline.
Ideally, I would have liked to stop production for three months in
order to complete the tools that were still missing and reorganize the
pipeline and validation process but of course we had no such time with
E3 coming fast. With the help of a very thorough audit by our
technology group, the changes described above were implemented
(Implementation of a database, redesign of the pipeline, implementation
of task groups, etc.).

However,
one aspect that has not been covered much in the sections above, even
though I believe it to be crucial, was the team spirit between key team
members. To address this, the following personnel modifications were
implemented:

Empowerment of the key employees who were functional in their posts,
pushing down the decision process to the right levels. This allowed me
to keep an eye on problematic issues while maintaining a strategic view
of the production (It is my belief that the industry is still often
stunted by a producer hand-in approach that is not appropriate to the
size of our current teams.).

Switch of duties, or reinforcement, for those who were inefficient in their current posts.

Total suppression of the weekly team-leads meeting which had turned into griping sessions.

These
are all personal-related issues, which might seem unimportant on the
surface but deeply affected the decision and communication process of
the team.

All the changes described in this post mortem helped but were not enough in themselves, and it has to be said that if Myst IV: Revelation
came out in time and with zero critical bugs, it is due to the
relentless work and ingenuity of most members of the team who, knowing
they were working on a legendary brand, compensated for all the
difficulties of the project.